


before the devil knows you're dead

by Missy



Category: Kill Bill (2003 2004)
Genre: F/F, Revenge, Romance, Teenagers, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-03
Updated: 2011-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-15 08:34:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nikki knows she's fucked up even before the kiss ends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	before the devil knows you're dead

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle XI, Prompt: Kill Bill, B.B./Nikki, Settling Scores. This is, of course, futurefic, and BB and Nikki are both eighteen.

They’re easy to find, really. She didn’t even have to use her imagination. A mining town in Alaska, four hundred miles outside of Anchorage. Beatrix has set up a dojo and is teaching little kids kra maga and judo.

When Nikki hears that, she nearly pukes on her new shoes.

And B.B. is mommy’s special helper, of course.

***

Beatrix knows who she is the second she walks through the door. Probably from the look in her eyes, not from her suburban mall rat clothes (she doesn’t have the flash of a Kiddo – never needed it. Her hands speak for her).

Nikki doesn’t draw her sword. She doesn’t try to shoot “Bea” (she will get used to calling her Bea and hate it, the bile in her guts churning with every spoken endearment).

She just walks up to Beatrix and tells her that her name is Nikki, and she’s looking for a job and a room to let.

Her eyes grind, blue and steely, upon Nikki, but she doesn’t draw her sword. This is Nikki’s battle to initiate, and she selected the method she wanted to use years ago.

She’ll insinuate herself and poison from within, like a puff adder, slow and painful.

She sees the look in her mother’s eyes at the moment of her death, reflected up at her from a cool glass case filled with trophies.

****

The routine isn’t that bad. She teaches classes every afternoon, eats whatever godawful dinner Bea insists on cooking them, then shoots the shit for a few hours on the back porch with BB.

They’re like a regular Partridge Family.

Except Nikki starts realizing that the more B.B. hangs around (she’ll learn later that that’s the only thing to do in this damn town – hang around), the longer she stares at her lips. The more often she wonders what it would be like to kiss her.

Every night, she squeezes the worry stone Sofie gave her before putting her on the plane out to Anchorage. Every night, she remembers the confused look on her mother’s face in death.

Every. Damn. Night.

***   
Bea approaches her one morning while she’s drinking her morning cup of joe. “Whenever you’re ready, I’m ready,” she says, as if she’s making an appointment to get her nails done.

“Right,” says Nikki to the green prairies and the mountain hills stretched out before her.

“I know I don’t have the right to ask you this, but could you do me a favor?”

Nikki lashes her head back, half expecting Bea to tell her to put down the toilet seat, or pick up some fucking Cheeri-Os. But Bea stares back, implacable.

“Don’t do it in front of B.B. Don’t drag her into this, too. It ends with you and me.”

Nikki is shocked by proposition – mostly by how reasonable it is.

“All right.

Every day, she squeezes the worry stone.

***

Sofie fucks up the hit. Naturally, she does. Bea takes off her head and half the heads of her hired assassins before they make yellow snow all over the mountainside. Nikki’s left wiping the blood of her mentor off of her machete while Bea’s husband (her fucking HUSBAND, some nebbish from town. Nikki never bothers to learn his name) freaks out and tries to call the cops .

Bea says that she needs to go find Elle. She tells her husband it’s the dream trip they’ve always wanted, a once-in-a-lifetime-journey across the globe.

And that’s when she suggests B.B. and Nikki stay behind, and run things.

***

Nikki knows she’s fucked everything to hell the first time she kisses B.B.

The first time they melt together, warm and sweet and languid, she knows she’ll never be able to break her heart and fucking kill her mother. The only thing she wants to do, day in and day out, is sit there and talk to B.B.

She is fucked.

Fucked.

Fucked.

***  
They lie in a sweaty heap under the boxwood tree, Nikki’s head resting on B.B.’s stomach, her bare breasts dripping with sweat, the blond hair between her legs smothered in the summer heat, contrasted with the molasses color of Nikki’s own hair. Her tongue dips again and again into the wellspring of B.B.’s sex, and B.B. cries out, her nails digging into the cool, sweet earth beneath them, thrashing, blind, unseeing. They do anything they can imagine or dream of with their tongues, mouths and fingers.

There are bite marks all over her body that she’ll never be able to explain to her mother.

This is the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to Nikki.

She knows only that she’s bound to her word, and she won’t break it.

B.B. won’t see a thing…

***

When she stops seeing her mother’s face at night and starts seeing B.B.’s, she knows it’s time to die.

***

When Beatrix comes home, Elle’s blood is still caked thick under her nails. She feels lighter than she ever has, giddy. She runs to the bathroom to wash for supper, throws open the door, expecting to find B.B. in the tub, taking her afternoon bath.

Instead, there lies Nikki and B.B., cradled together in a puddle of blood (the coroner will say B.B. shot Nikki through the heart before turning the gun on herself and she will wonder how her baby could do that to herself).

She won’t see the words Nikki scribbled with her dying breath until they move several weeks later.

 _Still raw._

***

Beatrix spends hours scrubbing the tiles. Her hands go raw and her fingers bleed, and finally her husband carries her to bed a weeping mess.

First, she invents wild stories of how it must have happened (Nikki, hysterical, deciding it was the only way for them to be together; B.B. getting the gun and carrying it back, ceremonially. The kiss of two doomed lovers before the encroachment of death’s specter. Two girls barely out of their teens convinced that they would never love again, that their love was the only love in the whole world).

Beatrix knew. She never had to ask.

Two months later, she understands the scope of Nikki’s revenge, one that left her alive, but stripped her of the one person she loved the most. Nikki had lost everything in her short life, even her mind. Tit-for-tat. Tat for tit.

Four months later, she steps out of the house for the first time.

Five months later, she keeps walking.


End file.
